All about phototropism!
Starting with this week’s T.I. there will be a whole new format! Each T.I. will include a foursome feast:
- A fitness element — something to work your martial grit
- A fighting element — something to work your martial skills
- A faith element — a meditation, contemplation, prayer or sacred reading. And finally the fourth element, which is all new…
- A frontier element — a technique, skill, insight or tip relating to old-time lifeways, like nature observation and such.
Why? To shake things up a little and promote my Frontier Rough ‘n’ Tumble (“FRT”) program of course!
Sign up for the Bobcat FRT program at Mitch’s General Store for just $19.99/month. When you sign up you get a Bobcat Martial Arts hat and t-shirt ($29.98 value), a white bandanna and membership certificate ($9.99 value), a paperback copy of The Wildwood Workbook ($7.99 value) and your first training module ($9.99 value). Each month you get a new module, book or other set of assignments and a 30-minute coaching call. Just keep a training journal and send it in each month for evaluation and promotion. You’ll be feeling fine as frog fur!
And now without further flourishing…
Phototropism: Martial Arts T.I. #222
- Warm-up thoroughly for at at least 8 minutes. Do 2-3 minutes each of (a) jumping rope (b) light calisthenics and (c) shadowboxing, forms, or light heavy bag work, or 8 minutes of MBF.
- Escape Plan. This one combines the fitness and fighting elements into a single delicious layered casserole of goodness. See video below. Set timer for fifteen intervals of 1 minute. Run a minute, shadowbox for a minute, and do martial-relevant calisthenics for a minute. Repeat four more times and your done. Adjust running speed down to jogging or walking, and add rest breaks as needed, to suit your fitness level. When you’re done, cool down by taking a walk and look at some trees.
- Learn to find north using phototropism. Plants naturally grow toward the light — even trees (see picture above). Branches on the north side of a trees tend to be more vertical, those on the south more horizontal. Go for a walk on a tree-lined street that runs east-west and look at the trees. Ain’t that something? Could save your life someday!
- Sacred reading part 3. This month’s symbol is the Book. The essence of sacred reading is to analyze what you read in four different ways: literally, morally, allegorically and anagogically. Last week you did some reading and some analyzing. This week, memorize a meaningful snippet of sacred literature and recite it to yourself often during the week. Memorizing sacred words gives you a special type of understanding — not so that you can impress your friends or hit people over the head with fancy words, but so that your command of the ideas can shape and hone they way you think.
- Journal. As always, log everything you did and thought about in your training journal, even if it’s only a few lines. If it ain’t in the training journal it didn’t happen!
TWO MARTIAL ARTS DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAMS AVAILABLE. 100% free and operated through my non-profit, Cabal Fang is a martial arts for personal development, self-defense and fitness. If Frontier Rough ‘n’ Tumble — the fighting arts, survival skills, lifeways and ethos of the colonial and indigenous peoples of North American during the frontier period (1607 – 1912) — is more to your liking, check out Bobcat Frontier Martial Arts, my for-profit martial art project. Click either photo to get started today!
Robert Mitchell Jr. 